4 digital marketing myths to leave behind in 2015

SEO and online marketing industry has a though year 2014. Google algorithm updates like Panda, Penguin and Pigeon have completely changed the game. Best practices of the past few years are not good enough in current scenario. Many web marketers and SEO professionals are struggling to get the desired result.

Professionals who failed to get results by monotonous SEO practices are trying to rebrand themselves as “Digital Marketer” or “Internet Marketer” or “Content Marketer” etc. But the mistake they do is, they just change their identity not the techniques they were using. Their inability to adopt the change and understanding the trends is the biggest reason for this. They failed because they were so firm with their basic concepts that they refuse to accept the myths in the industry.

2015 is the time to come up with the new fresh techniques for the online marketing that can boost up the speed in online races. Here we are discussing the four common Digital Marketing myths that every digital marketer should leave behind. Some myths are that marketers should have avoided in the past year to get success with their online campaign. Anyways, it’s never late to get started. Here are the top four myths of SEO for 2015.

Inbound Marketing = SEO = Content Marketing

All these three terms are not the synonym of each other. Though people tend to use it as synonyms, Inbound Marketing is not SEO and Search Engine Optimization can’t replace by the Content Marketing.

Inbound Marketing is the philosophy that focuses on directing the new visitors on a webpage into your customers. The main four phases of inbound marketing are Attract, Convert, Close and Delight. Inbound marketers use different tactics like Content Marketing, Conversion Optimization, and Social Media Marketing etc. throughout the different phases of Inbound journey. Search Engine Optimization is the process of driving the maximum traffic to a website and achieving better keyword ranking position in search engine. SEO and Inbound Marketing are inexorably linked to each other. SEO helps to drive more visitors to the website that is essential for Inbound Marketing. Content marketing is focused on creating and sharing the useful content for your prospective customers. As content is most important ranking factor, proper content marketing can drive you the success in an SEO campaign.

Inbound Marketing is a Methodology whereas SEO is the Process and Content Marketing is a technique that drives the result for SEO and Inbound Marketing.

Marketing ends with the conversion

It is not true. The job of online marketer doesn’t end with the lead conversion. Whether you are in service industry or selling product online. The success of your marketing campaign can only be measured on the basis of customer’s satisfaction. Online marketing helps you to get the new customers but you need to provide the best user experience throughout the buying journey and at the end of buying cycle to make them your repetitive customer. Marketing after the conversion includes providing better insights about services or product, getting review about the services, regular interaction with customers via different channels, etc. Another myth about online marketing technique is that you need to do it only once and it will give you the direct leads. You must understand your customer buying cycle and where your marketing techniques result in that cycle. It is not necessary that your efforts always turn into lead. It may take customer anywhere in the buying process.

More social media profiles = More success

Social Media Marketing is a significant part of any online business strategy. Even Google and other search engines look for the social media presence while ranking the website. Social media opens up the opportunities to interact with online audiences via different platforms. 92% of the total businesses have used social media marketing for their business promotion in 2014. There are many social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumbler and many more. That doesn’t mean you have to sign up with your business account in each and every social media platform available online. Creating social media profiles on as many platforms is not important. Important is, to interact with your targeted audience on regular basis via the social media platform they prefer. First, identify which social media platform can grab your targeted audience the most and create a strong profile on that platform only. That is essential to get success via social media marketing.

SEO is all about Ranking and using Header and Meta Tags drives the Ranking

“Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting top ranking position in search result.” If you believe so than “oh boy, you have completely misunderstood the purpose of SEO.” Getting top ranking is not the end goal of SEO. It is just a part of the process. The goal of SEO is to get more and more visitors to website through organic search result. Ranking and Click through rate are highly co-related with each other, but it doesn’t mean that getting top ranking is the end goal of SEO campaign. Generally, users tend to click the top three results, but implementation of rich snippets now has increased the click through rate of the results below top three positions as well. Majority of the SEO people believes that H1 tags and Meta Tags are the elements that directly help to boost up the ranking. Google uses more than 200 ranking factors while providing the search result for a specific keyword. H1 and Meta tags should not be practiced as the only weighted factors of rankings by webmasters. Creating H1 tags and Meta tags targeting main keyword give the signal of over optimization to Google that may hurt your website rankings. There are lots of other factors like page speed, usability, content quality, authority of the backlinks that Google uses to rank the website.

These are the four myths that one should leave behind to get the online marketing success. There are also few more like; links are more import than content, guest blogging always hurt the website performance, more content on home page means better visibility, authorship helps to get better ranking, Local optimization is least important and many more. 2015 is the time to come over all these marketing myths and create a digital marketing strategy to get the maximum online success.

What are the other digital marketing and SEO myths that people still believe? Share your thoughts in comment box below.